Hans Luyten

School Effectiveness Research: From a Review of the Criticism to Recommendations for Further Development.

School effectiveness research (SER) has flourished since the 1980s. In recent years, however, various authors have criticised several aspects of SER. A thorough review of recent criticism can serve as a good starting point for addressing the flaws of SER, where appropriate, thereby supporting its further development. This article begins by reviewing the criticism from different perspectives by discussing the political-ideological nature of SER, its theoretical limitations and the research methodology it applies. The review of each type of criticism is accompanied by a review of the recommendations that the critics propose for improving SER. We then proceed to present our views on each line of criticism and propose 5 avenues that we consider promising for the further development of SER.

Modeling the influence of school leaders on student achievement: How can school leaders make a difference?

Purpose: The aim of this study was to examine the means by which principals achieve an impact on student achievement. Research Design: Through the application of structural equation modeling, a mediated-effects model for school leadership was tested, using data from 97 secondary schools in the Netherlands. Findings: The results showed a small positive effect of school leadership on the mean promotion rate in schools, mediated by a development-oriented school organization and favorable classroom practices. The promotion rate may be considered as a measure of efficiency. No indications of direct positive effects of school leader activities on student achievement were found. This might be the result of the relatively small differences in overall student achievement and school leader behavior between the schools studied. Conclusions: The results underline the important role school leaders play in school effectiveness and offer valuable insight in how school leaders actually can make a difference. School leaders were found to have a strong influence on development orientation in schools, which shows similarities with the idea of the “learning organization.” This study points to the importance of school context. The results show that contextual variables have considerable effects on several variables in the model.

The effects of the use of a school self-evaluation instrument

School quality care has become important in many Western countries. A number of self-evaluation instruments have been developed in response. The goal of these instruments is improving the quality of education. One such system, ZEBO, was developed for performing quality assessment in Dutch primary schools. The use of this self-evaluation instrument was studied in 79 primary schools in The Netherlands over a period of 5 years. The results of the multilevel analyses with repeated measures show that the use of the self-evaluation results had no effect on pupil achievement scores (so far). However, it did have other effects, for example, an impact on the professional development of teachers.

Stability of school effects in Dutch secondary education : the impact of variance across subjects and years

This chapter reports the results of an investigation into the stability across both years and subjects of school effects in Dutch secondary education. What distinguishes the present study from previous ones dealing with the stability of school effects is the fact that two types of instability have been investigated simultaneously. Not only the instability across years and subjects has been established, but also their interaction. This interaction effect should be interpreted as follows: a school may produce outstanding results with respect to a certain subject one year, while the next year the same school may reveal rather poor results for the same subject. The following specific research questions were addressed: (1) What percentage of the total variance in student achievement per subject can be attributed to differences between schools and to what extent are these effects stable across years? (2) To what extent are school effects stable across subjects? (3) To what extent does the instability across years interact with the instability across subjects? The school effects per subject were found to be fairly stable across years, but schools appeared to produce remarkably divergent results across subjects. A substantial interaction effect of instability across years and subjects was detected as well. The findings largely corroborate the conclusions of recent studies stressing the important role of departments in secondary schools. The general differences between schools with respect to student achievement turned out to be very modest, making up no more than 4% of the total variance in student achievement.

Effects of Schooling on Reading Performance, Reading Engagement, and Reading Activities of 15-Year-Olds in England

This article reports the findings of an analysis into the effect of one year’s schooling for 15-year-olds in England on reading performance, reading engagement, and reading activities. The analyses were done on PISA 2000 data by applying a regression discontinuity approach within a multilevel framework. The effect of schooling is estimated as the difference between students from two consecutive grades minus the effect of age. A remarkably modest effect on reading performance was found, and no significant effects were found for the other two measures. The effect on reading performance was found to be somewhat stronger in schools with disadvantaged student populations.

The Size of School Effects Compared to Teacher Effects: An Overview of the Research Literature

If one takes the variance between grades (in primary education) or subjects (in secondary education) as an indicator of teacher effects within schools, the conclusion that teacher effects dominate over school effects seems inevitable. Comparisons between parallel classes within schools should be considered more valid, but these studies fail to provide clear support for the supposition that teacher effects outweigh school effects. In any case, they suggest that the dominance of teacher effects is not inevitable.

School size effects on achievement in secondary education : evidence from The Netherlands, Sweden and the USA

ABSTRACT In this article the results of an investigation into the relation between school size and achievement are reported. The findings relate to mathematics achievement in Dutch, Swedish and American secondary education and to science achievement in the Netherlands. The analyses sought to provide an answer to the following questions: (1) Is school size related to achievement independently of student background characteristics such as sex, achievement motivation, socio‐economic status and cognitive aptitude? (2) Is the effect of school size related to any of the aforementioned background characteristics? (3) Does the effect of school size on achievement differ between the educational systems of the Netherlands, Sweden and the USA? (4) Is the effect of school size the same for different measures of student achievement (mathematics versus science)? It was hypothesized that school size would be most strongly related to achievement in the USA. The analyses, however, revealed little empirical evidence for th...

The contribution of schooling to the cognitive development of secondary education students in Cyprus: an application of regression-discontinuity with multiple cut-off points

This article reports the results of a study in which the basic regression-discontinuity approach to assess the effect of 1 year of schooling is extended. The data analysis covers the 6 grades of secondary education in Cyprus and thus assesses the contribution of secondary education to the cognitive development of 12- to 18-year-old students. A model with multiple cut-off points is fitted. Achievement scores on both curriculum-based tests in language and mathematics and the non-curriculum-referenced Comprehensive Test of Cognitive Development (CTCD), which measures the development of 5 domains of reasoning (i.e., categorical, quantitative, spatial, causal, and propositional), were analysed to measure the effect of schooling. Implications of findings for the development of educational effectiveness research are drawn.

Dropout in the lower tracks of Dutch secondary education, predictor variables and variation among schools

This study analyses the data from a large-scale longitudinal investigation into the effect of both school and student characteristics on the dropout rate for students in lower secondary education in The Netherlands. Dropout rates were found to vary significantly between schools, but only a single school variable was identified that correlated significantly with dropout rate. The effect of relevant student characteristics (gender, achievement, parents’ level of education, minority status) did not vary significantly among schools, but for some variables the effect was found to differ between boys and girls or between minority and non-minority students.

Assessing school effects without controlling for prior achievement

The research findings presented in this paper illustrate how the “value added” of schooling can be assessed empirically using cross-sectional data. Application of the regression-discontinuity approach within a multilevel framework produces both an estimate of the absolute effect of 1 year schooling and an estimate of the variation across schools of this effect. In the study reported here, the approach was applied to both a cross-sectional and a longitudinal dataset. The research findings indicate to what extent different results are produced when cross-sectional as opposed to longitudinal data are analysed.